About GEN in Kuwait

GEN began operating in Kuwait in 2012 following a visit from GEN President Jonathan Ortmans establishing a partnership with the Shuwaikh Vocational Incubator to organize Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW). The initial campaign drew 250 participants, planting the seeds for a more structured campaign that would grow steadily over the following decade. The next year, private-sector sponsors, universities, and international partners joined the campaign by organizing events and programs that connected founders with investors and other ecosystem leaders.

As the campaign matured and the coalition of organizations grew, the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait organized activities during GEW that brought international business leaders and strategists together with Kuwaiti founders. In 2021, the Embassy organized a GEW program at Yadawi, a creative arts studio inside Kuwait City's historic Bayt Al-Othman Museum. There, U.S. Ambassador Alina L. Romanowski spoke to an audience that included entrepreneurs, investors, educators, and Kuwaiti graduates of American universities. The program placed a deliberate emphasis on facilitating people-to-people networks linking Kuwaiti and international founders, and it established a model for later editions that moved from broad panels toward hands-on, founder-facing formats.

Anchored by the U.S. Embassy's public diplomacy program and partnerships with entrepreneurship organizations and local universities, GEN’s coalition includes Amideast Kuwait, a longstanding provider of entrepreneurship training in the country, that supports the campaign and offers founder skill-building during GEW. This distributed model has allowed GEN to bring on new GEW partners, while its wider community—including its founder community, investor, policy, and research networks, and entrepreneur support systems—gives GEN members in Kuwait points of connection on a year-round basis.

In 2024, the accelerator Etlaq by Launch, the Gulf University for Science and Technology (GUST) Startup Lab, and the U.S. Embassy introduced Startup Huddle during GEW. The Startup Huddle chapter featured entrepreneurs like Mohammed al-Suraye', founder of Dawraat; Abdullah al-Benayan, founder of ROF Group; and Rakan al-Fadhala, co-founder of Chocolatiness. Also during GEW in 2024, Wendy Ekua Da'Cruz, an economic strategist with the Virtual Global Consultant Group, led a series of women's leadership workshops, extending the campaign's reach to women founders and reinforcing a thread of inclusion in Kuwait's recent editions.

A consistent feature of GEN's work in Kuwait is engagement with the public institutions charged with growing the startup sector. The National Fund for SME Development, Kuwait's state vehicle for financing and supporting new enterprises, is a member of GEN's Startup Nations community, connecting Kuwaiti policymakers to a global forum for discussing the policies and programs that help new firms start and scale. That policy tie is mirrored at the program level: during the 2024 GEW campaign, visiting GEW speakers met with representatives of Kuwait's Youth Authority and the Industrial Bank of Kuwait to discuss initiatives supporting entrepreneurship, linking the week's founder-facing events to the institutions that shape access to capital.

GEN also connects Kuwaiti founders to its global programs. For example, Fahad Hamed Buqammaz, founder of BSHARF Watch Company, is a member of the GEN Starters Club—a worldwide community of founders that offers training, mentorship, and international networking—giving Kuwaiti entrepreneurs a direct line into GEN's cross-border network of peers and mentors.

GEN's engagement in Kuwait rests on relationships with a comprehensive set of institutions across government, academia, finance, and the private sector, including the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait, the GUST Startup Lab, the accelerator Etlaq by Launch, Amideast Kuwait, the National Fund for SME Development, the Youth Authority, and the Industrial Bank of Kuwait. Together, these partners have carried GEN’s annual campaign from university lecture halls and startup labs to the policy tables where Kuwait's small-business agenda is set.

As Kuwait's public and private institutions continue to invest in diversifying the economy beyond oil and building a knowledge-based private sector, GEN’s goal remains to provide Kuwaiti founders reliable access to the knowledge, networks, capital, and policy support that help firms start and scale, and to keep Kuwait connected to a global community of entrepreneurs, investors, and policymakers. With GEW now an annual fixture, and Kuwaiti voices present in GEN's founder and policy communities, GEN is well positioned to deepen its engagement in Kuwait in the years ahead.